Adam V's Blog

There is a pretty good chance I have a reading related learning disability.  This would explain quite a bit about my experience in school, from elementary on through graduate school.  I have been contemplating these experiences as I have listened to a larger debate about education in this country, its failings and its insistence on the link between testing and funding.

In Discipline and Punish Foucault asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, school, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”  Foucault locates the birth of the modern school, along with its brother institutions, with the rise of discipline at the start of the Enlightenment.  Discipline, he suggests, began when the Enlightenment “discovered the body as object and target of power” (Vintage Pres, 136).  Education became a task of applying power to bodies.  It churned a new obsession with allowed and forbidden behaviors and with schedules.  The role discipline plays in supporting capitalism is too obvious to be ignored.

This replaced the older model of learning, which relied on the link between a disciple and a master.  Benedictine monasteries produced this older form of learning in its most positive manifestation.  Young monks were placed under the care of a network of superiors, deans and abbots, each of which would have to answer for the status of their charges at the Judgment.  In addition to their prayers and reading, those in the monastery were also given a variety of job.  From making pots and pans to shepherding.  If we take the texts, the art and the service rendered to the community outside the monastery during the Middle Ages as any indication, we cannot deny the effectiveness of this form of learning.

Thinking back to my time in school, from Kindergarten to Graduate School, I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if this sort of personalism were available to me.  Is that why assigning a tutor to children who are diagnosed with learning disabilities is such a help to them?

Restoring an older form of pedagogy alone will not the break people’s dependence of capitalism, however.  They must become reacquainted with “the land.”  They have to relearn the crafts that are necessary to be self-reliant.  Specifically:  the growing and preparation of plants and livestock, the creation and upkeep of clothing, the acquisition of property and the construction of shelter, the methods of constructing furnishings and the means of obtaining medicines.  Sadly, these are subjects that our present educational system has deemed worthless.  Even though people have to engage in these activities far more often than they have to solve for x.

See also:

• The New Distributist League
• Berea College
• The Rule of St. Benedict
• Peter Maurin